In the future development of mobile communication systems, it will be necessary to introduce more access nodes in order to better satisfy demands of users, and to greatly improve the capacity and the throughput of a network, so that the network will become ultra-dense in the future. As there are more access nodes, there is a need of an effective communication solution to better provision of high-rate data transmission services for the users, and to better management of the large number of access points.
In view of the need above, such a dual-connectivity architecture has been proposed in the study of small cell enhancement that is as illustrated in the schematic structural diagram in FIG. 1, where user equipment maintain its connection with the small base station in addition to its maintained connection with a macro base station, so that the user equipment transmits data wirelessly over resources of the two base stations.
Although some of the user equipments can be connected with the small base stations in the dual-connectivity architecture above, the dual-connectivity architecture still relies upon the existing macro base station, so if there are a large number of small base stations, then both the communication efficiency, and the experiences of the user equipments will be restricted by the architecture, and consequently can not be optimized. For example, only a user equipment capable of operating at two frequencies can access a high-rate data transmission service, that is, the capability of the user equipment shall be qualified, a macro base station can only manage those small base stations in its coverage area, etc., thus restricting the communication efficiency, and the experiences of the user equipments, so it is desirable to propose a new architecture and communication method so as to address the issues of the connections and the communication efficiency in the case of a large number of small base stations.